


Cradlesong

by misura



Category: Caprica (TV)
Genre: Community: smallfandomfest, Gen, Post-Finale
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-17
Updated: 2014-06-17
Packaged: 2018-02-05 01:39:32
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,015
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1800742
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/misura/pseuds/misura
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"It's a very common delusion," he says. "To ascribe feelings, emotions to things physically incapable of experiencing either. You're not alone."</p>
            </blockquote>





	Cradlesong

**Author's Note:**

> prompt: _Clarice & Daniel, on your own_ (megan_moonlight)

The sermon is long and boring, as these things usually are - inasfar as Daniel remembers them. He accepts the fact of the Gods' existence, obviously, as every well-adjusted individual in the Twelve Worlds does, but he makes no claim to being particularly religious.

He's not sure if she notices him sitting there in the back.

On the other hand, he is reasonably sure that underestimating Clarice Willow is a mistake few people have made more than once. It doesn't matter, anyway; he's not here to be preached at.

Until it's over and he's walked up to her, he's not entirely sure what he _is_ here for, actually.

"For the record," he says, "I think you are one sick-minded, crazy individual."

(He's here for some name-calling, apparently. Well. To be fair: she did break into his home. Violently. Compared to that, what he's doing right now barely even qualifies as harassment, and his lawyers would probably make mincemeat even of that particular charge, assuming she'd choose to bring it.)

"Didn't anyone ever tell you, Mr Graystone?" she says gathering up her papers, in some absurd imitation of days very long gone. "History, as people know it, will be written by the victorious."

"Please, Sister. Call me Daniel."

She inclines her head once, and he is unaccountably reminded of Zoe. (Her first day of school, no doubt; moments like that tend to get stuck in one's memory, tend to get recorded, even. If he goes home and looks for them, he may very well find the holos.)

"You may address me as 'Sister Clarice'. Or 'Mother', if you wish."

"I had great respect for my mother," he says. Less so before he had a child of his own, but he rather imagines that's the usual way of things. Don't know what you've got till it's gone, and all that.

"Did you really?" she asks.

"You're just a curiosity, you know. A novelty. A fad. Nothing more. They come to see you because they're curious - because we've _programmed_ them to be curious. Soon enough, they'll lose interest and move on to something new. Some _one_ new."

Sarno has joked about someone bringing home a Cylon boyfriend. Sarno is a great comedian, a kidster, but he's not completely stupid - and perhaps more to the point: neither are the Cylons.

If Daniel didn't know any better, he might almost believe them to be alive - truly alive.

(He does know better, though; he knows that they are not Zoe, and that he himself is not one of the Gods, with the ability to create new life.)

"They're my children, Mr Graystone," she says. "They are, all of them, my children."

"I'm sure that you think so," he says. His fingers itch for a cigarette, something that will fill his mouth, his lungs with the sharp, bitter taste of ashes. "It's a comfort, isn't it? To believe you still have someone, that someone still cares even after all the horrible things that you have done."

(Tomas Vergis still haunts him. The feeling of the knife in his hand, the smell of blood, the expression on the other man's face.)

"They _love_ me," she says, and her face twists, becomes something ugly and hurt and naked.

_I hate you,_ he remembers Zoe shouting. He gives in to temptation and lights up a cigarette, watching the way she watches him doing so. Disapproval mixed with disdain. Zoe never looked at him that way.

"It's a very common delusion," he says. "To ascribe feelings, emotions to things physically incapable of experiencing either. You're not alone."

The media have not yet settled on a name for this phenomenon, nor do they appear to have quite made up their mind whether or not he is to be blamed for it.

All in all, though, he feels it's just as well that he's heeded the advice of an old and loyal friend not to bring the Grace program to market after all.

_The dead should stay dead,_ Cyrus told him.

_You're not really Cyrus,_ Daniel replied. _You're just a copy. There's no way for me to know whether or not that really would have been what he'd have told me to do._

_Thank you for making my point for me,_ Cyrus said, with that old familiar smile, and Daniel had ripped off his holoband feeling obscurely guilty and somehow dirty, like all the lessons he should have learned from Zoe somehow hadn't managed to stick at all.

"God is with me," she says.

"Is he? Funny, I don't see him around. Maybe he's hiding behind that pillar over there?"

"A non-believer like you could never hope to see Him in all His glory," she says. "Your pitiful little mind would be unable to process the experience."

"Not a merciful guy, is he? No longer looking to recruit?"

Possibly, baiting the madwoman with delusions of sainthood in her own church isn't the smartest thing he's ever done. But then, in some ways, he's as ugly and hurt and bereft of common human defenses as she is.

The one difference between them is that he's not about to seek comfort in some mad fantasy.

"God's army consists of those who require neither rest nor food," she says. "It has no place for the weak."

He's seen the newscasts, of course - the religious conflicts on Gemenon; the civil war on Tauron. Cylons committing the kind of slaughter that would have driven human soldiers insane, provided they hadn't been so already, to be able to commit such acts.

No concept of mercy, of saying _enough_ and putting down their guns, or turning on those who command them. No conscience, and no free will. Perfect killing machines.

_They are, all of them, my children._

"I'm the one who created them, you know," he says.

"You gave them life," she says. "God gave them souls."

"And you? What exactly is it that you gave them, Sister?"

She stands before him, papers in her arms, tall and proud. "A destiny, Mr Graystone. I have given them a destiny, and I will see them attain it."


End file.
